Monica Lent

Software engineer

Based in Berlin.

About

Hi. My name is Monica. I'm an American software engineer living in Germany. Before moving to Berlin, I worked in academia in domains such as natural language processing (NLP), eLearning, and cloud technologies. And long before that, I started making websites and learning HTML, PHP, and MySQL at the age of ten years old — you can imagine how baller my Neopets page was 😎 Since then I've specialized in frontend SPAs but generally love learning new programming languages and going outside my comfort zone.

These days I'm leading a distributed team of thirteen frontend engineers at SumUp, a German fintech company with major offices in Berlin, Sofia, and São Paulo.

My most recent passions and projects include design systems, chatops, U2F, and good documentation.

Building resilient frontend architecture
Change is inevitable. So is legacy. And too often, we as developers (who love to solve problems by coding) fall into the trap of believing the only way to fix it is by rewriting everything again and again. But how can we design an application architecture that is more resilient to change in the first place? How can we defend against entropy in a system where people are pushing changes every day? In this talk we’ll define what architecture means for the frontend, dispel some commonly-held myths, and look at specific tools and techniques on a scale from micro to macro that you can use today to keep your app from turning into that infamous ball of mud.

📺 Secrets to a successful design system @ React Day Berlin 2018
(Slides)
Inconsistent UI is the enemy of developers and designers alike. And while design systems are a modern and scalable way to solve this challenge, implementing one is not as straightforward as it might seem: from getting buy-in from management to picking your tech stack, rolling it out, and releasing changes to multiple apps — there are a lot of things that can go wrong. In this talk, you'll learn how to pitch a design system to your boss, rarely discussed technical caveats and challenges, and how to set your design system up for success from the start.

📺 The tech behind a design system that scales @ BrazilJS 2018
(Slides)
Design systems are a powerful way to scale a visual language across different products and technologies. This talk covers what a design system is and how a React-based tech stack can power a design system that scales as the number of developers, products, and parallel processes grows. You'll also learn about critical considerations and best practices you'll want to apply when introducing a design system at your company.

This talk was also given at React Open Source Berlin (Youtube) and React Vienna (Youtube).

Work experience

Most of my jobs have had a heavy frontend component, implementing single-page applications. I'm currently working a lot with Node, and in the past have also worked a lot with Python (Django/Tastypie/Fabric) and Neo4j/Postgres.